TrainDad

As you watch the train thun­der past the cross­ing gates, you turn to your son and yell, “hey, that was a new Evo­lu­tion loco­mo­tive behind those SD70s!” He stares at you, eyes full of admi­ra­tion and worship.

Okay, maybe not, but learn­ing how to iden­tify the major loco­mo­tives will make your railroad-watching more enjoy­able by help­ing you know what you are look­ing at. It’s actu­ally quite a chal­lenge; the var­i­ous types look remark­ably sim­i­lar. I’ll give you some short­cuts that will enable you to iden­tify the most com­mon engines, at least by fam­ily. To keep it short, I’m lim­it­ing the dis­cus­sion to major freight-carrying engines.

There are two pri­mary man­u­fac­tur­ers of loco­mo­tives today. The largest is EMD — Electro-Motive Diesel, for­merly a divi­sion of Gen­eral Motors. Right behind them is Gen­eral Elec­tric. Your first step is to fig­ure out whether your engine is a GE or an EMD.

Tip 1: Look for a tri­an­gle on the nose. Every GE loco­mo­tive (well, every one made in the last 20 years) has a diag­o­nally slanted panel not found on any EMD. As a double-check, look for a large “bread box” smoke­stack stick­ing up on top, nearer the back. Only GE uses them. I’ve out­lined both areas in the pic­ture to the right. Don’t be con­fused by the pic­ture. That’s a Nor­folk South­ern engine, but it doesn’t mean NS only uses GE engines — every rail­road line has a wide assort­ment of dif­fer­ent engines. Any­way, now that you know whether it’s a GE or an EMD…

Tip 2: If it’s a GE engine, call it a “Dash.” GE has made Dash-7s, Dash-8s, and Dash-9s. They all look remark­ably sim­i­lar. The Dash-7 is the one to hate, because it doesn’t fol­low the rule — it doesn’t have the tri­an­gle front. But it does have one won­der­ful detail:

Tip 3: If it has an arched cab roof, it’s a Dash-7. These are rare, since the last ones were made 20+ years ago. Enjoy it if you see one. Actu­ally, these look very much like an older style of GE engines, known as “U-boats.” They really don’t look much like the other Dash styles at all.

Tip 4: If there’s one big intake under the radi­a­tor flare, it’s a Dash-8. All of these loco­mo­tives have a huge, flared radi­a­tor “hat brim” that sticks out on top at the roof, at the back, above the rear wheels. The Dash-9s and their ultra-powerful cousins (the AC4400CW and AC6000CW) all have the intake grill divided into two or more pan­els. They will be about the same size and shape; they just will have dividers.

Unfor­tu­nately, the Dash-9’s, their cousins, and GE’s lat­est and great­est Evo­lu­tion series all look very much alike, and I don’t have easy, one-step iden­ti­fiers to help you tell them apart. (If you have a tip, add it to the com­ments below.)

That’s a good start for GE engines, but what about EMD?

Tip 5: If it’s an EMD with 8 wheels, call it a “Jeep.” A lit­tle back­ground: EMD loco­mo­tives are named with two let­ters and two num­bers. Their 8-wheeled engines all use the for­mat GPnn (“Gen­eral Pur­pose”). For exam­ple, the GP38 is a very com­mon engine. Their 12-wheeled engines often use the for­mat SDnn (“Spe­cial Duty”). To tell the most com­mon Geeps apart, look at the fans on top, clumped together at the back:

• The GP35 has two “tow­ers” with a smaller, rounded fan between;
• The GP38 just has two towers;
• The GP40 has three towers.

By “tower” I’m refer­ring to a round raised “wok” sit­ting on the roof, right at the back. You can see one in the next pic­ture.
Tip 6: If it’s an SD with a back deck you could hold a party on, call it an SD40. For bonus points, call it an SD40-2. It’s worth not­ing that the front deck is also over-sized. If you look at the pic­ture, you’ll see that the deck had to be extended to cover an entire wheel’s extra length. By the way, here’s a free­bie: notice that it doesn’t have a flared radi­a­tor stick­ing out of the roof like the GE engines. That’s not true about most SDs. About that radiator…

Tip 7: If the radi­a­tor flare on an SD has three pan­els, it’s an SD90 — called an SD90MAC. The three squares on the side are air intakes, and only the SD90MAC has three of them. So what hap­pened to the SD series between the 40 and the 90? Well, that’s a lit­tle more dif­fi­cult. There are two fam­i­lies of note: the SD60 and the SD70. If you can ignore all the fans and smoke­stacks and stuff on top of the roof…

Tip 8: If the body/roof line is straight, it’s an SD60; if it dips in the mid­dle, it’s an SD70 (but not if the radi­a­tor has three pan­els! Why does it have to be so con­fus­ing?). There are numer­ous vari­ants of SD60s and SD70s, but they should all con­form to this basic ID test.

Tip 9: Cheat. Some rail­roads — Nor­folk South­ern, for one — write the model num­ber on the cab wall, usu­ally under the engine num­ber. Wow, that should be tip num­ber 1!

Tip 10: Get a field guide. There’s one that’s very small (it’s meant to fit in a pocket) and easy enough to use that you can make iden­ti­fi­ca­tions on the fly. It’s the Field Guide to Trains of North Amer­ica from the Peter­son Field Guide series, and I rec­om­mend it highly. It cov­ers 150 dif­fer­ent types of loco­mo­tives used on 840 dif­fer­ent rail­roads as well as all rolling stock.

Have any other easy, fool­proof spot­ting ID meth­ods? Add them to the com­ments! This arti­cle has focused on North Amer­i­can loco­mo­tives; if any­one has tips for other locales, add them as well.